Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/478

 470

NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. v. JUNE IG, 1900.

Tribune had the most expensive telegrams of any paper. These were arranged for by Mr. G. W. Smalley, now the New York corre- spondent of the Times ; and as there was an alliance between the Daily News and the Tribune providing for the use of each other's telegrams, the readers of the London paper no doubt received mucli benefit.

The present outlay of the Daily News for war telegrams, exclusive of the remuneration and expenses of the correspondents, amounts to an average of 1,200/. a month.

Although the cost to the daily newspapers for correspondence and telegrams during the present war must be large, it cannot, of course, compare with that of the American Press during the fight between the North and the South. The New York Herald during the four years the contest lasted employed sixty special correspondents. Theloss in horses was seventy -eight out of one hundred and twenty- three.* The account of the capture of New Orleans, which occupied three columns, cost alone 260., while the entire outlay during the war amounted to 120,000.

Most of the newspapers, with the exception of the Times, now give the names of their cor- respondents. " Y. L ," in the Sphere of the 9th inst., states his belief that the practice was first commenced by the Daily Telegraph, in 1879 when it sent out Dr., now Sir W. H. Russell, to describe the incidents of the Zulu war. " Y. L." well describes our mili- tary historians as

"no longer chroniclers ; they are now literary kinematographers, who, from the distance of 7,000 miles, flash you out a transparency picture of a battle ere yet the mountains at the seat of war have ceased to resound with the roll of invisible musketry and the thunder of eight-mile-range guns."

No record of special correspondents can be complete without a tribute to those brave men who fell in the Soudan, and to whom a memorial has been fittingly placed in the crypt of our great Cathedral.

JOHN 0. FKANCIS.

THE OLDEST BASQUE SONG. MUCH has been written, in five or six languages, since the time of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who did so much for Bascological science, about the oldest known Heuskarian song. The latest publication dealing with this difficult question is the Appendix to a treatise called 'Cantabria y la Guerra Can- tabrica 7 (Tolosa, 1899) by my friend Don Isaac L6pez ta M.endizabal, of the University of Madrid. The song is the renowned Lelo


 * Grant's Newspaper Press,' vol. ii. p. 255.

or Erezciac ( = Eretziak = Elegies) preserved in the mansion called Solartekua at Markina, on the margin of the provinces of Gipuskoa and Biscaya, accessible by coach from the rail- way stations of Olacueta-Berriz or the coast- line. I had the curiosity to call there on 26 July, 1897, in order to see for myself if the words had been correctly copied and printed, and to obtain, if possible, a photograph of the page of the manuscript where it occurs. I was accompanied by Don J. M. de Bernaola, a priest of Durango, whose grandfather had entertained the learned German friend of Goethe when he made a stay in that former capital of Biscay. Don F. de Mugertegi, the master of the house (Etcheko-Jauna), not only very graciously consented to let us inspect the manuscript, but sent it to our inn on loan, so that we might look at it at leisure in true scholarlike fashion. He told us that Humboldt had been the guest of his grand- father there, and had seen the manuscript. For some account of Humboldt's tour in Basqueland see 'Guillaume von Humboldt en Espagne' (Paris, 1898), by my friend Dr. A. Farinelli, of the University of Innsbruck. The manuscript is a small library, an odd collection of miscellaneous documents in five volumes, bound in parchment, and entitled ' Antiguedades de Vizcaya,' formed by Ibarguren or Ibargiien, a lawyer of the sixteenth century. There was no index or book-marker to guide us to the page bearing the song, but my com- panion had the luck to find it early the next morning in tomo iii., cuaderno 71. We agreed that the text of it had never been correctly published by any of the preceding editors, most of whom had carelessly copied it the one from the other, with a sliding scale of blunders. We decided that the dialect in which it is written was Biscayan (in the provincial sense) of Ibarguren's own time, and that the song, which my friend called a sortsiko mayor* miglit well be a patrana or jest of that in- dividual himself. He thinks, rightly, that its value has been overstated. But it has a grim majesty of its own, and stands in the same relation towards later Basque as ' Beo- wulf ' does to English. Its scansion is irregular, as will be seen. It is the work of some one unaccustomed to Heuskarian spelling, and so curt and laconic in style as to be very obscure even for those gifted with the Pindaric spark (pindar in Basque) of vaticination. It certainly does riot come down, as some have

pp. 8-11 of ' Amona' ('The Grandmother'), a senti- mental poem by Antonio Arzac (San Sebastian, 5 May).
 * For a successful bit of work in this metre see